A complete system for learning to understand and speak a language better.
Have you ever watched a movie or series in a language you’re learning and had that exhilarating feeling of actually understanding some of the dialogue?
Without looking at the subtitles!
Maybe you’ve also had the experience that after watching the same scene several times, some lines of dialogue stuck in your head and kept coming back, like the lyrics of a catchy song.
You may not have realized it then, but what you were doing was forming brand-new memories, entirely through listening.
You tapped into the brain’s vast resources for storing auditory input.
Find out how you can use efficient learning techniques to access these mental resources on-demand, and take your listening comprehension and speaking skills in your target language to the next level.
Listening and speaking are deeply intertwined.
If you don’t understand what people are saying, you won’t be able to interact spontaneously with them and maintain the flow of conversation. This can be immensely frustrating, especially when you have already invested years in studying a language and still see no real progress in your ability to understand what’s being said.
Unlike written language, speech is fleeting. It’s gone the moment you hear it. When you hear it, you either understand it or you don’t.
Listening to someone speaking in a foreign language is far from being a mindless activity. Your brain must simultaneously process a lot of different information: intonation, articulation, word stress, syntax and, of course, the meaning of the words.
Lingophil’s unique Intensive Listening Comprehension Practice (ILCP) method turns listening from a passive activity into an active, deliberate practice, which will help you supercharge your listening skills in an effective and reliable way.
Simply immersing yourself in a heavy stream of audiovisual content won’t get the job done. Your listening comprehension skills need to be trained. Repetition is key.
Analyzing the corrections to your transcript reveals any gaps in understanding and helps you improve your grammar, spelling, and your vocabulary knowledge as a result.
Acquiring a new language is largely a process of forming and recalling memories of words and sentences and how they are constructed and used. Writing down what you hear greatly reinforces the memorization process.
When you transcribe, you are actively engaged with the material and are not likely to lose focus as quickly as when you just passively listen to a podcast or other audio material.
Obtaining corrections to your transcript reveals gaps in understanding, and helps you improve your grammar and boost your vocabulary as a result.
Makes sense, right?
Now it’s time to let you in on a little secret. You probably use ILCP every single day, without even realizing it.
Whenever you take notes of what someone is saying in class or in a meeting, jot down a phone number from a voicemail, or write a shopping list that someone else has dictated, you are processing oral information before turning it into a written record.
In your native language this is an effortless, almost mindless activity, because hearing, understanding and writing the words correctly is something that comes instantly and naturally to you.
In your target language, using materials that are slightly above your skill level makes it a high-focus, deep learning exercise which develops not only your ability to understand native speech with all its nuances, but also helps your spelling and your memorization of words and sentence structures.
…where you hear only the soundtrack with the voices, music, and sound effects that make for an engaging story.
Where the lines of dialogue you hear have been specifically written for learners who are at an intermediate level, using real-life situations and real world speech.
That allows you to create sentence by sentence transcripts of each audio, and text comparison highlights errors in your transcript, so you can directly learn from your mistakes and fill in gaps in what you hear.
Each episode contains short, targeted grammatical annotations, and a review lesson with different types of exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned.
Every episode also offers alternative words and sentences supplementing those you hear in the dialogues. These sentences teach you to say the same or similar thing in different words, and expand your ability to express yourself more flexibly.
Daniel Rivera, the Spanish voice of Luis talks about his role in ‘Imperfect Strangers’ trying to find his lost twin brother.
Fanny Blanchard, the French voice of Camille offers a glimpse into her part and the plot of Season 1 and 2.
If you prefer learning with videos rather than audio, book-learning, or if you don’t like typing on a keyboard, then Lingophil is probably not for you. However, if you enjoy learning with audio, tend to be a disciplined self-learner with a strong motivation to continuously improve your skills and want to attain a high level of proficiency in your target language, then Lingophil can effectively help you achieve your goals. Transcribing can be mentally intensive work, but it’s exciting to find out if you’ve understood correctly and rewarding and empowering to be able to recognize and clarify misunderstandings.
Becoming truly proficient in a foreign language requires long term focus and dedication. Our Intensive Listening Comprehension Practice™ method is uniquely designed to help you stay focused and learn our content thoroughly for maximum retention. Moving from intermediate to advanced isn’t just about learning more words. You often need to fill in gaps from your earlier attempts at learning the language. If you don’t take the time to fill in those gaps, your foundation won’t be as solid, which will make it harder or even impossible to take your language to an advanced level.
The vocabulary and grammar covered in Season 1 is roughly equivalent to the level B1 of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). Some of the content goes beyond that level, as the audios also contain colloquial and idiomatic expressions as well as some tense constructions that are not generally found in learning material for level B1.
The difficulty level gradually increases with each Season, as the audio makes greater demands on your listening comprehension and vocabulary skills. Memorization is subtly and effectively reinforced by repeating common expressions and patterns multiple times in different contexts throughout the story.
The story is presented in Seasons and Episodes, similar to a TV series. It’s like listening to a movie without the visuals where you just hear the voices and sound effects that make up an engaging story that teaches you vocabulary, grammar patterns, colloquial language and much more as you go along.
All audio material featured in the app is uniquely created for our courses and recorded by professional voice actors and actresses. It is not available anywhere else. You can meet some of the voices behind the characters in our story here.
The course is currently available for French, Spanish, German and Italian. The stories featured in the course are the same in each language. We add new Seasons several times a year.
Lingophil is a web application that runs in your browser. It requires an Internet connection. It runs on laptops, desktop computers, tablets and smartphones. Because the transcription exercises require you to type entire sentences, we recommend that you use Lingophil on a device with a standard keyboard, such as a laptop or a desktop computer.
No. Lingophil is based on our unique Intensive Listening Comprehension Practice method, which requires you to recall exact phrases that cannot be identified from preset answers. In Lingophil you will never be asked to pick the right word or phrase from a set of possible answers, do multiple choice exercises or play word games to practice vocabulary.
The course is designed for intermediate-level learners. Using the CEFR as a benchmark, we recommend that you have at least the equivalent of an A2 level to fully benefit from the course.
You get lifetime access to the Lingophil app and our serial story consisting of at least 8 episodes per Season, our transcription tool TScribe™, detailed text annotations, verb and tense usage tips, alternative expressions and 160 practice exercises.
